Yesterday, the ninth Firefox 4.0 beta was released. One of the major new features in Firefox 4.0 is hardware acceleration for anything from canvas drawing to video rendering. Sadly, this feature won't make its way to the Linux version of Firefox 4.0. The reason? X' drivers are "disastrously buggy". Update: Benoit Jacob informed my via email that there's some important nuance: hardware acceleration (OpenGL only) on Linux has been implemented, but due to bugs and issues, only one driver so far has been whitelisted (the proprietary NVIDIA driver).

But is it the job of Firefox to shield from blatant (security) bugs in the underlying OpenGL API and neglecting the bugfree implementations in the process?

First of all, if an implementation is shown to be 'bug-free' then we'll gladly whitelist it in the next minor update.

And yes, it is our job to shield the user from buggy drivers, buggy system libraries, whatever. You don't want to have to wait for your OpenGL driver to be fixed to be able to use Firefox 4 without random crashes.

Rather more use and exposure would motivate the driver developers to fix their buggy drivers.

That would be nice, but we also need to be able to ship Firefox 4 ASAP without lowering our quality standards.

Perhaps a blacklist could be implemented notifying the users that their driver is buggy and Firefox will run unaccelerated? This would raise awareness without negatively affecting the "good systems".

This is information of a very technical nature that most users won't know how to act upon. For technical users, we *are* already printing this information in the terminal.